CONSCIENCE
274
CONSCIOUSNESS
the people with a love for the good and the beautiful.
He possesses to a higli degree the sense of the dra-
matic and pathetic; he has a wonderful power of grasp-
ing the picturesque side of things, and often renders
it with a rare fehcity of expression. His works en-
joyed a great vogue, and have been translated into
most of the European languages. Several English
editions appeared in London, Edinburgh, and Balti-
more. Among his historical novels "The Lion of
Flanders" and "Jacob van Artevelde" are consid-
ered his best achievements; among his studies of life
and manners the most successful were "Siska van
Roosemael" and "The Blessing of Being Rich";
among his village tales the best knoA^Ti are "The
Conscript" and "Baas Gansendonck". The city of
Antwerp raised a monument to this famous son,
which was unveiled some w'eeks before his death.
Conscience, Geschiedenis mrjner jcugd: lCF;Knorn, Henri Conscience (Brussels, ISSl); i>E Mont, //-/i'.,; i m ruTice, zijn leven en zijne werkcn (Ghent, ISS-l , ^1 i : > ., Les Flamands a propos de la raorl de H. Conaci' i,, ■ i ui nf de
race (Lyons, 1884); de Koninck, Bibliograil i - - , ., ; . helge (Brussels, 1886).
P. J. M.\RIQUE.
Conscience, Liberty of. See Toleration.
Consciousness (Lat. conscientia; Ger. Bewusstsein) cannot, strictly speaking, be defined. In its widest sense it includes all our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and volitions — in fact the sum total of our mental life. We indicate the meaning of the term best by con- trasting conscious life with the unconscious state of a swoon, or of deep, dreamless sleep. We are said to be conscious of mental states when we are alive to them, or are aware of them in any degree. The term self- conscious is employed to denote the higher or more reflective form of knowletlge, in which we formally recognize our states as our own. Consciousness in the wide sense has come to be recognized in modern times as the subject-matter of a special science, psychology; or, more definitely, phenomenal or empirical psy- chology. The investigation of the facts of conscious- ness, viewed as phenomena of the human mind, their observation, description, and analysis, their classifi- cation, the study of the conditions of their growth and development, the laws exhibited in their manifesta- tion, and, in general, the explanation of the more com- plex mental operations and products by their reduc- tion to more elementary states and processes, is held to be the business of the scientific psychologist at the present day.
History. — The scientific or systematic study of the phenomena of consciousness is modern. Particular mental operations, however, attracted the attention of acute thinkers from ancient times. Some of the phenomena connected with volition, such as motive, intention, choice, and the like, owing to their ethical importance, were elaborately investigated and de- scribed by early Christian moralists; whilst some of our cognitive operations were a subject of interest to the earliest Greek philosophers in their speculations on the prolilem of human knowledge. The common character, however, of all branches of philosophy in the ancient world, was objective, an inquiry into the nature of being and becoming in general, and of cer- tain forms of being in particular. Even when epis- temological questions, investigations into the nature of knowing, were undertaken, as e. g. by the School of Democritus, there seems to have been verj' little effort made to test the theories by carcfiil comparison with the actual experience of our eonsciciiisni s-;. Ac- cordingly, crude hypotheses received :i ccMi-iilriMl.lr amount of support. The great dil'IVnTicc bet wren ancient and modern methods of investigating the human mind will hv. best seen by comparing .Aris- totle's " De Anima" and any modern treatise such as William James' " Principles of Psychology", or James Ward's article on psychology in the ninth edition of
the " Encyclopa-dia Britamiica". Although there is
plenty of evidence of inductive inquiry m the Greek
philosopher's book, it is mainly of an objective char-
acter; and whilst there are incidentally acute observa-
tions on the operations of the senses and the constitu-
tion of some mental states, the bulk of the treatise is
either physiological or metaphysical. On the other
hand the aim of the modern inquirer throughout is
the diligent study by introspection of different forms
of consciousness, and the explanation of all complex
forms of consciousness by resolving them into their
simplest elements. The Schoolmen, in the main,
followed the lines of the Greek philosophers, especially
Aristotle. There is a striking uniformity in the trac-
tate "De Anima" in the hands of each successive
writer throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. The
object and conditions of the operations of the cogni-
tive and appetitive faculties of the soul, the constitu-
tion of species, the character of the distinction between
the soul and its faculties, the connexion of soul and
body, the inner nature of the soul, its origin and des-
tiny are discussed in each treatise from the twelfth to
the sixteenth century; whilst the method of argument
throughout rests rather on an ontological analysis of
our concepts of the various phenomena than on pains-
taking introspective study of the character of our
mental activities themselves.
However, as time went on, the importance of cer- tain problems of Christian theology, not so vividly realized by the ancients, compelled a more searching observation of consciousness and helped on the sub- jective movement. Free will, responsibility, inten- tion, consent, repentance, and conscience acquired a significance unknown to the oUl pagan world. This procured an increasingly copious treatment of these subjects from the moral theologians. The difficulties surrounding the relations between sensuous and in- tellectual knowledge evoked more systematic treat- ment in successive controversies. Certain questions in ascetical and mystical theology also necessitated more direct appeal to strictly psychological investi- gation among the later Schoolmen. Still, it must be admitted that the careful inductive observation and analysis of our consciousness, so characteristic of modern psychological literature, occupies a relatively small space in tlie classical De anima of the medieval schools. The nature of our mental states and pro- cesses is usually a,ssumed to be so obvious that de- tailed description is needless, and the main part of the writer's energj' is devoted to metaphysical argument. Locke's " Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) and the writings of Thomas Hobbes (15SS- 1079), both of which combine with confused and superficial metaphj-sics much acute observation and genuinely scientific attempts at analysis of various mental states, inaugurated the systematic inductive study of the phenomena of the mind which has grown into the modern science of consciousness, the empir- ical or phenomenal psychology of the present day. In Great Britain the idealism of Berkeley, which resolved the seemingly independent material world into a series of ideas awakened by God in the mind, and the scejv ticism of Hume, which professetl to carrj' the analysis still farther, dissolving the mind itself into a cluster of states of consciousness, focused philosophical specu- lation more and more on the analytic study of mental jihenomena, and gave rise to the .\ssociationist .School, i This came at last virtually to identify all philosophy with psycholog;;'. Reid and Stewart, the ablest rr|.rrspiitiitives of the Scotch School, whilst opposing Iliniiis teaching with a better psychology, still slI■(■rl^thened by their method the same tendency. Meantime, on the Continent. Descartes' system of methodic doubt, which would reduce all philosophical assumptions to his ultimate coyilo. eri/o sum, furtheri'd the subjective movement of speculation from anotlier side, for it planted the seed of the sundry mocleni
